“I’m all these words, all these strangers . . .”
SAMUEL BECKETT, The Unnamable
The performer’s voice is shallow, unable to save the energy needed to qualify sentences after they have been spoken. Each utterance sounds ultimate, even when the words themselves are tempered by his humor or reasonableness, or by his obvious exhaustion after finishing a line. An egotistical actor would indicate triumph over his condition; a maudlin one, shame. Here, the man’s voice may reach the limits of his language and then withdraw, but his face continues speaking – of the desire to speak with more precision, and of the knowledge that even if he succeeds, he won’t shake his compulsion for making sentences.
There are in fact few sentences in his text, The War in Heaven, an enthralling collaboration between Sam Shepard and its performer, Joseph Chaikin, begun in February 1984 but not completed until after a stroke in May left Chaikin aphasic. By the time they resumed work, Chaikin had recovered some of his ability to speak; but as a writer he was limited by a severely depleted vocabulary, and as an actor by his inability to memorize. His character, an angel who “died/the day [he] was born,” crashing to earth and “here/by mistake,”1 testifies about his condition in abrupt phrases, many of which shatter in performance as Chaikin works to sustain his interpretation. The shivered words mark the turns in a second, shadow narrative that transforms the angel’s story of his exile from heaven into a parable of memory and language – Chaikin’s own exile from the Eden where everything has its name and speech grants life. Chaikin and Shepard dramatize two interdependent losses of faith – one in what the angel calls “a lawful order . . . that was clear to me” (139); the other – more painful – in the survival of a language strong enough to depict and then protest such a loss.
The action of The War in Heaven is brief and straightforward, and its style, tailored to Chaikin’s abilities, is plain. Sitting alone and motionless, the angel recalls images from a once secure and purposeful life; meditates on love, death, and the fate of the soul; and, in telegraphic bursts of complaint, implores his listeners to relieve his suffering by sending him home. But neither form nor content is as memorable as the sight of Chaikin striving to give them life in performance. As a text, The War in Heaven conceals too well a vulnerability and anxiety revealed only in the theatre. The ease with which a reader moves through the play irons out its emotional texture; published phrases retain little of the interesting difficulty that accompanied their composition. The same absence of tension weakens radio broadcasts of the play (the medium for which it was conceived): dead air engulfs each line; audiences can’t see Chaikin resisting or speaking through the silence.2
But as Chaikin returns to his text to reanimate it on stage, this impression changes. A seemingly banal line, when preceded by a gasp and punctuated by an expectant stare, sounds like a victory for ordinariness over the style his infirmity imposes on him. “Music is great,” the angel says at one point (155); and the sentence is unexpectedly convincing, even luminous, simply because it is a sentence, arriving after we have seen Chaikin try to assemble others. Passages that are uncomfortably frank on the page – an inventory of the modes and benefits of sexual coupling – refer in performance less to their subject matter than to the futility and unpredictable consequences of any intimate act of speech, even that of less afflicted speakers. Phrase after phrase merely arranges bodies in proximity to one another and charts their fumbling toward communion. Occasionally both actor and character win release: the angel utters an obscenity, and Chaikin’s face floods with a look of surprise mixed with child-like defiance, as if in pressing against one obstacle to clear speaking he had burst a valve somewhere else, and now can’t control the flow of candor.
Of course candor and spontaneity are relative terms for Chaikin, for whom even a line scripted and rehearsed in advance sounds uncertain when he says it. Throughout The War in Heaven Chaikin performs on the brink of error: his script lies before him on a small table – he has never recovered the skill of memorization – and between passages of difficult speaking Chaikin abruptly turns business-like as he looks down, turns the page, and scans the lines to come. The page-turning sets a stately pace underneath Chaikin’s performance: it serves as a kind of continuo to his arrhythmic speech. He shifts his attention frequently between the script and his audience – only a few lines are printed on each page – and in each case the change is sharp and complete, like the undisguised transitions that Brecht asked from his actors when they prepared to sing. “I’ll perish,” the angel says at one point (141), but before his emotion can soften or lose credibility Chaikin switches it off with a look at his script. Suffering aspires to the restraint of rhetoric.
Indeed, sitting at his table he looks like a witness giving a deposition, emerging periodically from the narrative he is reliving to check his accuracy and, perhaps, assess his effectiveness. Once again, Brecht provides a model, here with the “Street Scene,” yet unlike that bystander Chaikin doesn’t sound confident in his account, nor sure that the means even exist for making a fuller version of it. (He also, in an implicit challenge to Brecht, shows the pain of self-demonstration, of never being spontaneous.) Memory itself is on trial: Chaikin’s prepared speech, unlike other testimony, lacks the aura of authority; instead it admits its imperfection at every turn. The moments when Chaikin seems about to make a mistake are among the production’s sharpest – not because they are alarming or grotesque, as are, say, moments when a dancer falls, but rather because they recreate Chaikin’s original fall into speechlessness. Its suddenness and severity, along with its victim’s panic, is for an instant made palpable; just as shocking is the grace with which he recovers. Disaster is averted as Chaikin leaps over silence lasting longer than he may have intended, or respaces syllables which collided the first time he pronounced them, or stops himself from omitting even an insignificant word. On such occasions, the writer appears alongside the actor and his character, guiding these other selves back toward the moment when their anxieties about language were first faced and resolved.
In the combat between Chaikin and a language he no longer fully recognizes – or between Chaikin-the-writer, already released from that battle and with the finished script to show for it, and Chaikin-the-actor, now sent in to claim those words for himself – The War in Heaven becomes something more than just a stirring depiction of one man’s struggle; more, too, than a play whose value could be seen as primarily therapeutic for its performer and, as such, a mere curiosity on the margins of both Chaikin’s and Shepard’s careers. Rather, during the twenty minutes it takes Chaikin to perform the text, theatre returns to first things – not simply to language unburdened by plot, nor to the actor undisguised by character, not even to the actor’s voice, made prominent by the prohibition on gesture, nor to the silence it ruptures, something given such generous space in The War in Heaven that it seems like a substance. Chaikin goes deeper, directing attention to the silence before silence, when the absence of speech hasn’t yet settled into a shaped pause or controlled rest. There, the mute actor is revealed in turmoil, despite his outward calm, readying himself to speak or suffering the disappointment at not speaking fully, still in a state of expectation and contending with what Freud, in his study of aphasia, calls “an abundance of speech impulses.”3
Such empty spaces aren’t scheduled to escalate suspense or deepen emotion, nor do they mock Chaikin’s difficulty in translating writing into speech. Instead, they are arenas for work, where Chaikin can decode and silently rehearse individual words. They also invite him to shore up gains made toward clarity and to muster strength for the next utterance, as he refuses to allow more definitive silences. We are witness to the mesmerizing spectacle of an actor working to enter, and repeatedly to reenter, his role – to engage his text, then stay its course. The play is busiest in these seemingly idle periods. Here one can sense Chaikin’s fear of losing his place, his frustration at knowing that there are words more suited to his purposes than those he can say, and finally his need to resist both fear and frustration if he is to say anything at all. When speech does return, it sounds anticlimactic: words are an always disappointing reduction of the activity that occupies him when language is inaccessible.
A delay that for Chaikin is an unwelcome fact of life can be seen as an exaggeration of the seconds just preceding every actor’s speech, alive with potential and as yet undiminished by a choice of style. It also matches the related silences at the scene of writing, in which a writer waits before finally locating an elusive word and rejecting its many attractive synonyms. For the writer, too, choice brings regret: there are always other ways to write a sentence, ideal phrasings forever beyond one’s reach. “Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett’s undaunted speakers (this one from Worstward Ho) are an inevitable point of reference for The War in Heaven. Like Chaikin, they deflect their own discoveries of language’s inadequacy and become eloquent in the only form available to them – “worsening words,” as Beckett puts it elsewhere in Worstward Ho, “leastening words.”4 Several critics have linked Chaikin’s post-stroke performances to the Mouth in Not I and to Lucky’s “divine aphasia”; in recent years, Chaikin himself has acknowledged the affinity by reviving his stage adaptation of Texts for Nothing (first produced in 1981) and by giving public readings of a 1988 poem Beckett dedicated to Chaikin in its English translation, “what is the word,” its prosody seeming to follow Chaikin’s breathing patterns; its unanswered, unanswerable title-question his own.5 Yet neither Beckett’s language nor the silence whose greater strength it confirms is as pertinent to Chaikin’s art as the period between them – after a character is compelled to talk, but before the sound of his voice disappoints him – a place Beckett names in Texts for Nothing as “a road . . . between two parting dreams” and again in The Unnamable: “Gaps, there have always been gaps, it’s the voice stopping, it’s the voice failing to carry me.”6
Aphasia maps such a gap precisely, keeping Chaikin suspended between words and their meanings. In The War in Heaven, the angel describes getting lost on a mission and finding himself stuck “in between” his origin and destination – a place to which he is condemned indefinitely and from which he speaks to us now. “Every second I’m here / I’m weakening” (140). This condition, and the intermediate space in which he suffers it, are matched in formal terms whenever Chaikin delivers a key sentence which recurs throughout the text: “Take me back,” it reads, but its initial unambiguousness is complicated in performance, as Chaikin sets his jaw, squints, and singles out a spectator to address in a tone heard nowhere else in the production – sharp, impatient, raw. There’s nothing generalized about his injunction; unable to get God’s attention, the angel buttonholes one of us instead. Yet the emotion powering the first word seems to exhaust the resources needed for the next two. Silence follows “Take” like a syntactical emblem of the gulf separating the angel from heaven and Chaikin from his language. As it widens before he speaks again, both actor and character seem to fear the loss of dignity in such a plea and acknowledge the hopelessness of their condition – a realization Chaikin confirms only in the hoarse tone and faster pace for the rest of the sentence.
The “in between” has long been favored territory for Chaikin and Shepard, in their own work and in collaboration. Tongues alludes to a man “born in the middle of a story . . . in the middle of a people”; another voice listens to the dead “between the space I’m leaving and the space I’m joining . . . between the shape I’m leaving and the one I’m becoming.”7 Writing of the Open Theatre, the company he founded in 1963 and ran until it closed in 1973, Chaikin praises the actor who is “between a place he knew and moving to where he doesn’t know” and the “mysterious encounter” possible in performance, “caused neither by the actors nor by the audience, but by the silence between them.”8 The Open Theatre’s Serpent addresses the difficulty of what its chorus calls being “in the middle” after the Fall causes “separation.”9 Shepard’s own plays offer concrete images for these abstractions. In La Turista, Kent describes his life as a jumping between rooftops. Waco, in The Mad Dog Blues, feels caught “between livin’ and dyin’.” Even Dude, the musician-protagonist in Melodrama Play, describes his identity crisis in similar terms: gesturing to their posters, he says he’s “stuck in the middle” between Bob Dylan and Robert Goulet. Closest to Chaikin may be a description of Weston’s father from Curse of the Starving Class. “Right in the midst of things,” says his son, “he lived apart.”10
The War in Heaven is an index to Chaikin’s and Shepard’s art in other ways as well. On stage, Chaikin, like a palimpsest, shows traces of roles he played earlier in his career – not just the speaker of Tongues, hoping to “find [his] voice,” and of Texts for Nothing, but also Woyzeck in his own struggle toward speech, the blank slate of Galy Gay’s character, and of course Hamm, paralyzed and skeptical, his talk marking time. Moreover, Chaikin returns us to the principles underlying both his own and Shepard’s theatre, if only to test our faith in them. Shepard’s ideal of vaulting speech and self-generating narrative; Chaikin’s early beliefs about the actor’s presence and voice, his or her obligations to a character, and the role of the audience – these must adjust to boundaries set by aphasia, and in the process become more rigorous.
The same is true for the ideal of collaboration itself. As both subject and method, collaboration has preoccupied Chaikin and Shepard, separately and together, for years. At the Open Theatre, as he experimented with trust and interdependence among the members of the ensemble, Chaikin seemed to promote similar ideal arrangements outside the theatre. Shepard credits Chaikin for teaching him to expand the relationship between the actor and the audience in his own work. He is also preoccupied by threats to more general linkages – the “thread in culture,” as he put it in an interview, “the connecting river” of generations.11 The most personal version of the space “in between” – and least examined until the recent collaborations – is that separating Shepard and Chaikin themselves. The War in Heaven bridges that gap, giving Chaikin access to more language, but it also envisions what happens when the bond loosens and Chaikin is left alone to fill the silence.
The significant encounters in Chaikin and Shepard’s four-decade-long relationship are well known and susceptible to myth-making. Shepard started going to meetings at the Open Theatre in 1964, invited by his then-girlfriend Joyce Aaron, a member of the company. Under Chaikin’s guidance, the Theatre was expanding the actor’s affective range, dismantling traditional hierarchies in theatrical collaboration, and, in a series of landmark works, posing the most persuasive challenge to the then-dominant representational tradition in American theatre. By his own account, Shepard was more onlooker than participant in these efforts, but he did contribute material to the workshops for two collectively created productions. For Terminal (1969), he wrote three speeches, none of which were included in the final text written by Susan Yankowitz. (Shepard’s speeches are published in his Hawk Moon.) After moving to London in 1971 he sent Chaikin texts for Nightwalk (1973), the final Open Theatre production; one passage, about “me on [a] ship . . . staring out to myself in [a] house,” anticipates images of self-division in his later work.12 During these years, the collaborative energies flowed both ways: Open Theatre actors performed in Shepard’s own work, most notably in Icarus’s Mother (1965). One of those actors, Ralph Lee, also designed The Mad Dog Blues (1971) at Theatre Genesis. An Open Theatre director, Sydney Schubert Walter, staged the premiere of Fourteen Hundred Thousand (1966). Chaikin himself acted in a later television production of the same play. The Theatre also supported Shepard’s earliest work in screenwriting – Chaikin and other company members appeared in Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother (1968); the entire ensemble appeared together in one scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970).
After the demise of the Open Theatre in 1973, Shepard wandered the periphery of Chaikin’s new group, the Winter Project, but the pair didn’t work closely together again until 1978, when they created two works of music-theatre, Tongues and Savage/Love, both performed by Chaikin, with Shepard accompanying him on percussion in early performances. (A year earlier, Shepard had adapted Chaikin’s approach to collective creation and improvisation to his own purposes, producing Inacoma, a music-theatre piece inspired by the case of Karen Ann Quinlan.) In 1991, seven years after the original broadcast of The War in Heaven, they met to revise the text for a stage production. In 1996, the pair co-wrote When the World Was Green (the one collaboration in which Chaikin did not act) for Atlanta’s Seven Stages Theatre; it was remounted for the Signature Theatre Company’s 1996–97 retrospective of Shepard’s work, a season in which Chaikin also staged a new production of Shepard’s 1965 play Chicago. Most recently, in 2001, Chaikin directed the New York premiere of Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss.
A second history of the two men’s relationship shadows this narrative. It is harder to chronicle, for it lacks the obvious denouements of productions and publications, but it is the context for such work, where Chaikin and Shepard maintain the flexibility of collaboration itself. In this broader view, Chaikin and Shepard win and then direct one another’s attention with many unremarkable exchanges – of articles, photographs, recordings (“Did you receive the Bach piano–violin sonatas?” Chaikin writes, “Did you enjoy them?”), and especially books and recommendations of books – de Beauvoir, Kierkegaard, Vallejo, Bettelheim’s The Informed Heart, a poem by James Dickey, and an unnamed book, probably by Kafka, in which Shepard reads only the parts Chaikin has underlined. (Here even attention is collaborative.) In many of these transactions, the two artists cultivate one another’s tastes and enthusiasms without regard for their eventual translation into a play. In turn, the accumulation of offerings, and the shared language they constitute, give stability to a professional intimacy derived as much from error, uncertainty, and misunderstanding as from the pleasures of shared creativity.
Shepard and Chaikin’s letters, edited by Barry Daniels, track this hesitant progress.13 From his earliest visits to the Open Theatre, Shepard worried about his place, fearful that the wayward, unsocialized imagination of the solitary writer would be harnessed by an ensemble seeking a common language. Later, when Shepard mailed in texts for Winter Project productions, he again found himself anxious, this time less about relinquishing control than about his ability to share the obsessions of a group he hadn’t joined. Shepard’s worries over his place became literal in the months they worked on Tongues and Savage/Love. The logistics of bringing the two artists together in one city long enough to complete a project is a leitmotif of their correspondence, as Chaikin resists leaving home and Shepard, averse to New York, spends long stretches on the West Coast, out of the country, or in perpetual transit as a film actor. Even when they do meet, they keep changing locations – beach, restaurant, hotel – as if afraid that familiar scenery will cause complacent work.
In these periods of willed nomadism, or unavoidable detachment, letters sustain the relationship. In fact, to a large extent correspondence is the medium of their collaboration. In the making of Tongues and Savage/Love, letters enabled the exchange of research, initial discussions about structure and substance, and later revision of one another’s material. Set against this record, the sporadic and brief face-to-face meetings, while rich in invention themselves, nonetheless seem like the denouement of a much longer, freer, and more various process of discovery. To a pair of artists sensitive to how the environment conditions the imagination (and determined to control that relationship), correspondence itself establishes an ideal zone for work – unpopulated, uncontaminated by uses other than their own, resistant to distraction. This kind of collaboration depends for its success on each partner’s solitude.
Even more crucial is the delay before the writer receives a response. Each letter borders a silence filled with second thoughts and anticipated reactions. Such purposeful waiting rarely occurred in the collaborative theatre-making Chaikin supervised at the Open Theatre, where the actors reacted to one another’s suggestions quickly, nimbly, before reason could inhibit or prettify their actions. But Chaikin and Shepard may welcome delay – for in the time between when a letter is sent and answered they experience a version of the same condition they dramatize: it is another “in between” space, where they, like the characters in all four of their pieces, are severed from a listener, uncertain of their verbal reach, and acutely aware of the gulf they hope to cross.
Long before he had adapted his language to the aphasic delays in The War in Heaven, Shepard had paid tribute to this kind of segmented collaboration, or collaboration-in-separation, in his own work.
KOSMO I’ve had a vision! . . .
YAHOODI Sing it.
KOSMO I can’t. I can’t get my head straight. I have to take a trip. I have to go somewhere else.
YAHOODI Me too.
KOSMO The city’s gettin’ me down. Too many tangents. It’s no place to collaborate.
YAHOODI Maybe we could do it by mail. I’ll go to the jungle and write you.
KOSMO Good idea. I’ll go to San Francisco and do the same.14
More than geography frustrates the relationship between these two visionaries from The Mad Dog Blues. They are also unsteadied by their chronic loss of confidence in their imaginations. Even as they summon and set in motion various larger-than-life figures – Captain Kidd, Paul Bunyan, Jesse James – they doubt they can sustain the same high level of invention throughout the play. Moreover, they fear they lack the self-discipline to sort out and see to completion all the picaresque narratives they have initiated. Finally, as the play ends and the cast of characters under their direction wanders the stage, no longer supported by plot or even their inventors’ interest, Kosmo and Yahoodi discover the depth of their incompatibility, something hitherto obscured by the exuberance of their playing.
Shepard’s candor about the flaws in their pact, and more generally about the weakness of inspiration when faced with the demands of craft, derives from a broad distrust of all forms of romanticism: it’s a commonplace of Shepard criticism that his theatre exalts only to explode American symbols, shared narratives, and, especially, the articles of faith that bind together families, couples, and even the many personae latent within a single character. The anti-idealism Shepard shines on public and private stages is especially unforgiving when directed at theatre itself. Not just at any theatre: to a spectator schooled by the Open Theatre or fresh from The Presence of the Actor, Chaikin’s eloquent 1972 catechism, Shepard’s plays may seem private commentaries on their lessons.
One such response, his adapting of Chaikin’s so-called transformation exercises, is well documented. As several critics have argued, the playwright’s shapeshifting characters may owe their freedom from transitions (and the over-explicit psychology such transitions indulge) to the director’s technique, illustrated by Open Theatre actors changing personae in performance without regard for credibility.15 But Shepard also engages Chaikin in other, less acknowledged ways. The Mad Dog Blues is only one of many early plays in which he seems to be cross-examining his collaborator, testing workshop hypotheses about ensemble loyalty, improvisation, and the freedom of the imagination in the rougher arena of his characters’ lives, then forcing a closer look at the consequences. These early plays seem even more skeptical after one sees The War in Heaven. Admirers of Chaikin’s performance may find that the impasse he reaches had been anticipated by Shepard in many plays where vibrant language and surprising action conceal a deeper uncertainty.
Readers of Shepard tend to remember best a protagonist’s “arias” (as Patti Smith was the first to call them) and the lyrical ambitions they inspire in the other characters, but equally important are the sinkholes that open up between them when inspiration flags. Time and again, Shepard’s characters will launch an improvisation only to see it collapse before it lifts them beyond their circumstances. Many of their verbal games, structured like Open Theatre exercises, promise to tighten relationships among the speakers. They do so, but inevitably they end, and then the security they conferred turns doubtful. Characters are alone once more, even when together, as the promise of collaboration vanishes. Shepard lingers in the aftermath, making his characters wait before they start a new conversation, for as the later plays with Chaikin make explicit, his brand of speech is meant to be heard in counterpoint to his silences. These reassert the power of a character’s self-consciousness, unrelieved by any act of impersonation, and of the reality from which they hoped their talk would free them.
Assuming that Cowboys #2 is a fair facsimile of the lost Cowboys, Shepard’s first play, the young writer was wise to the frustrations of artistic exchange long before he had initiated his own collaborations, and critical of the deceptions of his style even as he was learning its range. The youthful high spirits of the play’s two protagonists conceal the awkwardness and ultimate failure of their attempt to synchronize their separate fantasies of the Old West. Stu and Chet become “Mel” and “Clem,” bowlegged old-timers dropping the ends of gerunds as they hobble around the stage complaining about the weather and fearing an Apache ambush. At the start, they pick up one another’s cues easily, without needing to confer first on the direction of their impersonations. But after only a few moments they diverge. “Hey! Come back!” says Stu, in his own voice, as Chet gets carried away dancing and whistling. Stu falls behind again when Chet, as Clem, nags him to come up with a poetic simile for the clouds. “Would you give me a chance,” Stu says, dropping his role again. “I haven’t even thought of it yet.”16
As they tinker with their partnership, they offer a useful corrective to the mythology of collaboration. Their private theatre succeeds only if they check one another’s impulses as often as they cue them, and keep in mind the larger premises of their improvisation even as they respond to immediate stimuli. Moreover, the work of readjustment is ongoing. Cowboys #2 is a work of stops and starts, as one character must be persuaded to move on after his partner had changed the subject, or both characters exhaust the possibilities of one “scene” and, after pausing to stare at one another expectantly, reorient themselves. At the end, after Stu is “shot” by the “Indians,” he remains unresponsive long after this particular plot has run its course. A play that, at its opening, seemed designed to celebrate imaginative kinship and showcase the range of its inventions, ends by confirming each player’s alienation – from an imagined world, whose falseness grows undeniable as the lights brighten and the real-world noise of car horns fills the barren stage, and finally from each other.
Shepard deepened his critique in the years ahead. In Icarus’s Mother, as Pat struggles to disengage from her overattentive friends, fellowship is always coerced; independent thinking is always a threat. To the musician at the center of Melodrama Play, other characters appear less as sympathetic colleagues than as potential threats to his originality. Along with those in Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime, Shepard’s artist-protagonists resist influence even as they acknowledge, reluctantly, their dependence on it. At no moment in their playing are they able to forget the principles they compromise when they agree to work with others. As if sobered by the fate of these characters, Shepard offered a more modest and thus more viable image for collaboration in La Turista. The Boy tells of a father and son who walk toward each other on a long road, stop to share stories and sing a song, and then separate, each returning the way the other came. The meeting’s success depends on the partners’ willingness to forgo intimacy.
Cowboy Mouth (1971) and Action (1975) dissect intimacy with ruthless precision. Like the later works with Chaikin, Cowboy Mouth reflects the circumstances of its creation. According to legend, Shepard and Patti Smith, with whom he both wrote and, on one occasion, performed the play, began work by sitting across from each other, pushing a portable typewriter back and forth on the table between them, as each writer’s inspiration struck and faltered. (This ritualized, even erotic mode of writing together, would be cited in a more vicious context in True West, as Austin and Lee negotiate a relationship using their own typewriter.) The rhythm of Shepard and Smith’s collaboration, controlled by the exchange of the typewriter, is picked up in their play, as each character runs up against the limits of his or her own imagination and seeks a partner’s help. In one sequence, they tell each other stories from their childhood – about Slim damming a river, Cavale acting in a grade-school Ugly Duckling – then, exhausting that vein, transform into a coyote and a crow, hungry predator chasing his prey, until that game also peters out. “Now what’ll we do?” asks Slim, to which Cavale can only say, “I don’t know.”17
Her confession unseals their utopia, opening it to a sudden blast of real-world anxieties, before Slim manages to resecure the stage with another game: “We could call back the lobster man just for laughs” (159). Variations on this rupture recur throughout Cowboy Mouth. In fact, the play opens on a note of defeat: Slim sings a few lines of Patti Smith’s “You Cheated, You Lied,” only to break off abruptly into self-ridicule: “Fuck it,” he says, less to dismiss his efforts than to mock the hope of transcendence motivating them (148). Later, when Slim and Cavale imagine themselves out stealing Cavale’s dream pair of shoes – fancy tap-dance shoes, “red, with pretty ribbons” – they play easily, successfully, but nonetheless reach the same end. At the peak of their fantasy, Slim produces a “beat-to-shit pair of high-topped sneakers” (151). Reality has trumped invention.
It does so again, definitively, in Action, a play whose conclusions prepare the way for the portraits of solitude in the Chaikin collaborations. Its characters surrender to centrifugal force, scattering to the margins of their stage-world, where they are marooned on their own self-interest. The action, such as it is, is occasioned by a communal ritual – a Christmas dinner – and the four characters gesture toward various other allegiances throughout the play. The women pair off to hang laundry; the men tap-dance together and pretend to be bears; all four gather around a mysterious book, taking turns reading aloud as if it were a Bible. But none of these relationships survives the characters’ eventual indifference or the appeal of other activities. The ensemble rearranges itself in numerous combinations but changes neither the overall composition of its world, nor the low-grade emotional temperature limiting their activity. In this world of false starts and dashed expectations, Action shifts attention to the self-doubt preceding an attempt at kinship, and to the helplessness following its inevitable refusal or severance. Shepard paces his play according to this awkward advance and retreat, and, as in other works, leaves intact the empty, introspective spaces between the movements, in which we may imagine the need which compels the characters to pledge themselves to one another, experiment with personalities they hope will win them a place in the group, and tell stories to manufacture intimacy with a listener.
The benefits of such companionship have always been assumed rather than argued, as Jeep discovers when he asks “What’s a community?” and no one can answer him. “A sense of –,” Lupe says. “A sense um – .” Shooter tries next: “Oh uh – .” Lupe concludes: “It doesn’t need words.”18 But it does, for it’s only with language that these individuals evolve into citizens of a kind, supported by something larger than themselves by virtue of their ability to describe it. Speech alone establishes kinship: “We hear each other . . . We know each other’s voice,” says Jeep, “We’re not completely stranded . . .” (184). Such is the ideal, but Shepard doubts its viability throughout Action. When Shooter launches into his own description of this community – “I can picture it . . . a whole house is being built!” – his listeners don’t join in the fantasy, as characters do elsewhere in Shepard, but instead cut him off. “Keep it to yourself,” says Lupe (184). And so he must, locked within his own language, imagination, and even stage space. He anticipates Jeep’s own isolation, acknowledged obliquely when he speaks of feeling “dismissed” – from the group, perhaps, but also from his own history and even from consciousness, the means by which he engages the present. “Gone,” he says, nostalgic for a world he was never allowed to join in the first place (188).
Once more, Shooter, the play’s ignored visionary, finds the appropriate image for a condition he shares with all four characters. He speaks of standing in the snow at night, his face pressed up against the windows of a cozy, candlelit house, expecting a warm welcome when he finally comes inside, only to discover that “it’s not like how you expected” and that he must “hunt for a way of being with everyone.” As David Savran stresses, this shift isn’t just territorial: it’s also from exterior silence to an interior where (as Shooter puts it) “everyone [is] using a language.”19 “It’s a shock,” Shooter continues, for his own language, surfacing with difficulty, can’t compete. It seems incurably private, derived from some other, unshared lexicon, or keyed to a context unknown to his listeners. His only recourse: “You act yourself out” (178).
Earlier in the play, and in response to a different subject, Jeep had said to Shooter, “Don’t act it out!” (171). He was irritated by Shooter’s need for attention, of course, but he also sounded like someone unable, or by now unwilling, to believe in art’s consolations. Yet where would he and the others be without their stories, impersonations, dances, and recitations? After commands such as Jeep’s, Shepard’s theatre stops short, as it does in his other plays whenever a character can’t keep the dialogue going. In these ellipses, their theatrical landscape no longer transforms as it does when the four characters speculate about the future, reminisce about an equally uncertain past, or imagine alternate worlds in which they might flourish. Instead, the stage hems them into the present tense, where they are reconciled to and reduced by their own dull presence. The ideal which Chaikin envisioned in The Presence of the Actor has become a burden.
The art derived from Chaikin’s aphasia pushes forward from what Shepard, in Action, had treated as a dead-end. Like Jeep, the Chaikin who performs The War in Heaven scorns the pretense of “acting it out.” Like Shooter, he speaks from under the weight of silence, his words showing the strain to be heard, as well as his fear that even if they are, they won’t be understood. Along with both characters, Chaikin feels “dismissed” – an exile from communities convened and maintained by speech, and from his own earlier self, once whole, with a history that fell away when he lost the language to think about it. He, too, could be “spying on his body,” as Shooter describes the sensation of not recognizing oneself in the bathtub, a body that eventually “killed him” (182). Indeed, Chaikin’s angel echoes this when he says “I’m hovering / above myself / looking / for a way / back in” (144). Finally, he heeds Lupe’s command to “keep it to yourself” with a thoroughness and pathos beyond anything seen in Action.
Alongside Shepard’s characters, Chaikin may seem literal-minded – presenting a neurological version of a condition Shepard envisioned as metaphysical – but he doesn’t make it any less allusive. Far from it: unable to step outside his condition by speaking of it, as the characters in Action do, Chaikin conducts a self-exposure more primitive and thus more punishing than conventions of acting (and character-drawing) usually allow. He doesn’t present a mere portrait of aphasia but something changeable and thus harder to reproduce – an endless cycle of loss and retrieval and loss again. Like any play, The War in Heaven dissolves as we hear it; yet here its passage becomes a narrative superseding all others, made suspenseful by the steadiness with which Chaikin resists it. Unlike most actors, who draw energy from the momentum of their performance, Chaikin seems to push back against his own. The end of each minute leaves him wishing for more time to find and perfect his words, and confirms how much more remains to be said. Here is a vision of presence and the present-tense even more stringent than in Action: Chaikin is trapped in the present, denied access to the language needed to summon his past, unable to retain most of the words he does learn. But he also wishes the present to last indefinitely, or at least until he’s finished the long process of recognizing and naming everything he experiences. The future, with its promise of further loss, always arrives before he’s ready.
The neurologist most associated with aphasia, A. R. Luria, elaborates on this antagonistic relationship with time in his extraordinary book, The Man with a Shattered World (1972). Or rather, his subject does, for much of the text is given over to the writings of Lev Zasetsky, who describes with excruciating precision his own case, including the challenge of writing about it – a continuous twenty-five-year struggle with a memory conspiring to erase what it records. Zasetsky’s brain suffered an “insult” far more grievous than Chaikin’s – during World War II, he was shot in the head; aphasia was only one of his many forms of brain damage – yet the very extremity of his experience with language illuminates Chaikin’s own frustration, something easily minimized by the fact of Chaikin’s improvement (if not full recovery) and the poise of the art it made possible. Like Chaikin, Zasetsky was always having to reset his curiosity to the slower pace of his comprehension, his mind inventing strategies to outwit his brain. In another variation on a life spent “in between,” Zasetsky writes of learning to “detour around the gaps in my memory . . . the gaps between a word and its meaning.”20 In one section, he describes how he regained the ability to read after the injury:
I read printed matter letter by letter. When I first started to read again, I often couldn’t recognize a letter at first and had to run through the alphabet until I found it . . . Often after I’ve figured out the letters in a word, I forget the word itself and have to read every letter over again in order to understand it . . . Only after I read a word and understand it can I go on to the next word, and then the third. By the time I get to the third word I often forget what the first or sometimes even the second word meant.
(69)
Writing meant a different kind of exertion. As an act requiring movement as well as thought, writing came easier than reading: there seemed to be a bodily memory of language that survived the damage to his brain. Yet he still had to trigger the act – only when he remembered the words could he write them – and when it came time to read in order to develop or simply enjoy his ideas, he suffered as much as he did reading someone else’s prose. Moreover, he sometimes would forget a word before he reached his desk, so he began writing on scraps of paper – “clamp[ing] the words to the idea as much as I could” – and then later transferring them to a notebook, “regrouping the words and sentences, comparing them with others I’d seen in books” (79–80). Zasetsky divides himself in two, treating his own writing as found texts. No longer abstractions or mere signs, words become things, notes to be mastered by the body in lieu of the mind, arranged and rearranged like parts of a collage, in this form alone capable of withstanding the passage of time. It’s as if he hopes that each piece of paper will seal a gap in his perforated memory.
This sensitivity to a word’s material life is an extreme form of a trait shared with many other aphasics, including Chaikin, and has important consequences for the theatre he makes with Shepard. While aphasia comes in many forms – Roman Jakobson provided one useful taxonomy when he distinguished between “similarity” and “contiguity” disorders, the former affecting one’s understanding of metaphor, the latter, one’s understanding of metonymy – in most cases the aphasic resists abstractions.21 Seen as a liability, this symptom is what one neurologist has called the aphasic’s inability to “propositionize.”22 But seen as a virtue, it causes the aphasic to develop a passionate attachment to empirical reality. The aphasic unable to think metaphorically confines language to its context; words can’t be understood apart from their specific uses. A well-known case-study describes a patient who couldn’t say “no,” despite repeated prodding, until finally he blurted out “No, no, I told you I can’t say ‘no!’”23
The opposite type of aphasic lacks the language to perceive any form of relationship: his or her vocabulary is stripped of conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and other connective tissue. Zasetsky writes of how he knows the words for “mother” and “daughter” but can neither understand the phrase “mother’s daughter,” nor distinguish it from “daughter’s mother.” Another aphasic is able to say the word for “oar” but not its intangible conjunctive homonym, “or.” Chaikin’s colleagues have described how the director himself is most challenged by such simple abstract terms as numbers.24
Chaikin’s theatre with Shepard reflects this courtesy toward the concrete. Even before aphasia enforced it, their collaborations guided one’s attention away from metaphysics, toward bodies and their unambiguous, secular reality. In Tongues, Savage / Love, The War in Heaven, and When the World Was Green, the carnal wins out over the spiritual before an actor says a word. Despite Shepard’s description of Tongues as “a piece to do with the voice,”25 it and the other collaborations are also about physical confinement, often Chaikin’s own, as the actor is wedged in a narrow alcove in Savage/Love, kept in a chair and covered in a Mexican blanket in Tongues (a concession to Chaikin’s weak heart), sitting at the table and, in some performances, strapped into a heavy white robe in The War in Heaven, pacing around a cell in When the World Was Green. The texts keep returning to the immobilized actor, especially at moments when his language threatens to turn vaporous. The discussion of sex in The War in Heaven is only the most explicit instance of the collaborators’ ongoing examination of lives stripped of lyricism, unable to hide in allegory or even narrative, reduced in some cases to pure biological function. In Tongues, the speaker describes a hunger “that knows no bounds . . . hunger eating the hunger” (309) – an extreme version of his continuous surrender to sensory and sensual appeals. A beautiful long passage earlier in the play, bearing Shepard’s signature, lists the colors and textures of a room inhabited by a blind man: “the walls around you are green . . . the night is absolutely black . . . the light of [a] plane keeps passing slowly, blinking. Red and blue. Yellow and blue . . . Your shirt is blue . . .” (307–8). As the details accumulate, a character’s psychology, even history, are edged aside, rendered ephemeral by the testimony of the senses. “The whole of my self. / Vanished,” the speaker says in another section. “The whole of my body was left” (312).
The ignoble conclusion (and its flat tone) echo throughout The War in Heaven – “one day / dead / dead / and nothing else / just dead” (149); “sometimes God . . . / sometimes nothing” (142) – and again, by implication, in When the World Was Green. In the latter play, hunger also rules its protagonist, a celebrated chef who describes in detail his favorite dishes, yet his nostalgia is hindered by his environment. As the all-too-present prison cell disciplines his memory, our way of seeing changes accordingly, as it does in all these collaborations. Theatre that forces recognition of an actor’s presence ends by making us unusually aware of our own. Not just when Chaikin’s angel asks us to “turn me loose” or “take me back”: This theatre’s attentions are both more general – during The War in Heaven, Chaikin makes us feel that we are summoning his language merely by being there to hear it – and more intimate, as in Savage/Love, which ends with Chaikin looking at his audience, now merged with his character’s absent lover, and saying “You You You You.”26 The stage directions allow for an indefinite number of repeats: Chaikin won’t sever his link to us – the only reliable one in a work which, like the other collaborations, is suffused with loneliness – and thus the play can’t end.
Repetition becomes echolalia for the aphasic speaker – a deliberate, sometimes desperate attempt not to sink back into incomprehension the moment the voice rests. The War in Heaven seems to idle whenever Chaikin lingers over a phrase – “and more / and more / and more”; “so much / so much more / so much”; “open / open” – but in fact these passages are among his most engaged. The words themselves express the desire to expand and deepen perception, as Chaikin dwells on – and in – each word, deeming it a complete statement in itself, varying its timbre as if to keep before him an insight and the world it clarifies longer than his memory allows. The repeated words are placeholders in his thinking, as well as spurs to a useful form of self-consciousness. The director who once encouraged “transformation” in the theatre now, as an actor, wants only to maintain his identity. Likewise, the playwright who once insisted that “the real quest of a writer is to penetrate into another world. A world behind the form” (as Shepard put it in a 1977 essay) returns to the here-and-now.27 It is as if both were afraid of the answer to the question haunting The Unnamable: “Can that be called a life which vanishes when the subject is changed?”28
In these recurrent one- and two-word phrases Chaikin gives the lie to those who pity him as a “disintegrating actor” (in the words of one critic) and, no less forcefully, to those who praise him as heroic.29 He is, rather, engaged in the work of reassembly, contending with the uncertainty of success. The note of humility on which his character ends Tongues captures his own attitude: “Today the tree bloomed without a word. / Tonight I’m learning its language” (318). Forced to postpone mastery, he rejuvenates all aspects of theatrical form, not just the simplest act of speaking but also the words themselves, along with narrative structure, rehearsal, and memorization, and even conventions of spectatorship. He also forces one to reexamine others’ attempts at rejuvenation. Jonathan Kalb has suggested that Chaikin’s performance – an extreme version of the actor’s ideal of “as-if-for-the-first-time” – recalls, and realizes, Artaud’s vision of the theatre. Indeed, one might point to a famous passage from “No More Masterpieces” – “Any word, once spoken, is dead and functions only at the moment of utterance” – as a summary of Chaikin’s own supercharged relationship to language.30 Yet it would be a mistake to ascribe to Chaikin Artaud’s motives. Artaud envisions a “rhythmic repetition of syllables which [will] veil the precise sense of words [and thus] evoke multiple images in the brain.”31 While Chaikin can’t help but share Artaud’s experience of words as “spasms” or “movements,”32 he moves toward, not away from, that “precise sense,” burrowing into a word’s meaning as he repeats it. In 1977, Chaikin implied such an approach in terms that now, after his stroke, have added urgency:
Many mystical people I come across are rejecting language and saying, “We can’t speak, we meditate the silence, we can make sounds together, we can do different kinds of trips together, but when it comes to speaking it destroys meaning.” I don’t think that way. I think it is for people . . . who are agitated by the erosion of language to reconstruct it.33
He might have been reevaluating, or at least sharpening, his own, earlier beliefs: in The Presence of the Actor he borrows T. S. Eliot’s image of a “raid on the inarticulate” as he urges actors to get beyond “the reporting of sounds we use for conversation” – in them “there is the same potential for articulation as there is over coffee and a danish” – and instead “use the voice, not to refer to a condition, but to enter it.”34 What Eileen Blumenthal calls Chaikin’s “somatic” approach to acting is visible, or audible, in the keening laments in The Serpent and Terminal. The ideas motivating these sections are made explicit in the Open Theatre’s The Mutation Show (1971), in which two wild, speechless figures – one based on Kaspar Hauser – lose their identity once they are named, and narrow their vision once they are taught to speak. “The noise,” says the Kaspar in protest, “was me.”35
But now that Chaikin himself has arrived at a Kaspar-like state (a comparison he himself made in a 1987 speech), a more nuanced view of the value of language is required.36 Despite its simplifications and distortions, language nonetheless offers the means to engage what might otherwise be overwhelming, keeping at bay the fear of helplessness. Even mechanical speech recovers its value: in minds such as Chaikin’s, the only words that don’t drain away are those secured by habit, a force miraculously stronger than aphasia. Freud cites the case of an aphasic navy captain who could only remember the words connected to his profession: every experience or object now required a sailing analogy if it was to be acknowledged. Other patients whom Freud observed could sing a popular song or recite the days of the week – sequences of words drilled into them long ago and hard to dislodge – but fell silent when asked to repeat a single word of the lyrics or list the days in reverse order.37 Chaikin’s own history confirms this trend. Just before his stroke, he was memorizing lines from King Lear – he was to play the king (a character reduced to syllables himself) for the New York Shakespeare Festival; a friend remembers Chaikin reciting one of Lear’s speeches as he was wheeled into the operating room – and he could still recite some of his lines in the early weeks of his recovery, when few other words were available to him.38 The director who once lampooned automatic behavior – the superficial dinner-party scene in The Mutation Show is typical – is now grateful for his frozen script and for rehearsal. Habit isn’t the “great deadener” Vladimir said it was; rather it’s the only thing that restores his humanity – the feeling that the language is once again his own – and rescues him from the humiliation experienced in the presence of the unspeakable.
As it did with habit, aphasia may force Chaikin to revise his opinion of narrative as well. Much of his work with the Open Theatre welcomed interruptions, elisions, and reversals in narrative, or eschewed narrative altogether in favor of juxtaposed responses to a given theme. The Serpent dissects the Kennedy assassination and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden – isolating, reversing, and re-pacing the frames of the Zapruder footage; arresting the Fall at key moments to gauge the intensity of temptation. Terminal is even more episodic, presenting discrete portraits of dying with a minimum of explanatory comment. (Anything more linear would suggest a logic that the subject doesn’t allow.) Yet this fractured vision, so desirable when the Open Theatre worked to break apart preconceptions and create more immediacy in performance, is redundant to the aphasic, contending with so many other severed connections. Even if Chaikin remains skeptical of narrative’s assumptions about order, he nonetheless now hopes to follow and create other linear forms – a train of thought, a conversation, a sentence. Oliver Sacks, in his own discussion of Lev Zasetsky’s brain damage, points out that the patient’s all-consuming, identity-giving ambition was to recover the means of forming a story; only then could he hope to gain mastery over his discrete sensations and perceptions, assigning them degrees of importance, then storing them in the past.39 This narrative thread is a lifeline, no less necessary for being forever out of reach, its existence Platonic. As Peter Brooks argues in Reading for the Plot, this dependency claims us all, even those who resent it: we keep our lives going by telling ourselves our story.40
The post-1984 Chaikin–Shepard collaborations render precisely this ambivalent relationship to narrative. From one perspective, the two artists resist it as surely as they did in any of their earlier collaborations. The War in Heaven depicts a suspended life, the fallen angel barred from participating in any story other than that of his own suffering. When the World Was Green is static for more realistic reasons – the hopelessness of the prisoner’s state – although Chaikin and Shepard also argue the more general point that little is revealed about trauma in the mere recounting of it. Yet for all this caution about narrative, both plays are also tributes to its power – or at least to the power of its promise. Over and over, the angel grasps at conventions of storytelling – “once before,” “there was a time when,” “since then,” “I remember” – even though he has to drop them when they neither grant historical perspective on his condition, nor restore him to the world he has lost. He does finish one story – about waiting, in vain, at a dead man’s casket to see the soul depart from the body – only to be left with the irony that in the play’s only complete narrative, nothing actually happens.
Something does happen in When the World Was Green: a journalist interviews the prisoner on several occasions, until at the end she thinks she has learned his motive and reveals herself to be his victim’s daughter. Yet this denouement, predictable almost from the start, is far less interesting than the preceding search. Direct questions elicit evasive answers, which in turn prompt veiled questions and sudden confessions, until piece by piece their shared history emerges. The interrogation structure had been attractive to Chaikin as early as his 1966 production of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s Interview – Eileen Blumenthal describes workshop exercises that seem derived from it, and notes its recurrence in Winter Project productions.41 An invisible questioner goads the speaker in parts of Tongues and Savage/Love. Early, pre-aphasia drafts of The War in Heaven include an interlocutor character, but only since Chaikin’s stroke has the form had such far-reaching significance. It mimics his own ritual hunt for lost words, linkages, and histories: whenever he needs to speak, he seems to ask an earlier, now recalcitrant self to disclose the words he once knew. Beyond that, the interview form suggests that any story’s claim on us depends on its incompleteness. In The War in Heaven and When the World Was Green, Chaikin and Shepard create the only narrative that a skeptic about narrative could accept: the story of its assembly upstages the story it tells. Every destination in the plot recedes as the teller approaches. Its answers solve nothing. Its pattern is full of lacunae shaped to the things which memory continues to withhold.
A trend is emerging. In Chaikin and Shepard’s aphasic art, narrative seems less facile when it acknowledges the turmoil of narrating. The teller’s language, once taken for granted, recovers depth and texture in the hardship of speaking. Finally, the same shift to openendedness – from noun to gerund – occurs in memory itself, its surface disturbed by the work of remembering. It’s for this reason that Chaikin and Shepard eliminate catharsis in The War in Heaven (despite the angel’s certainty that “music delivers”) and treat the prisoner’s confession in When the World Was Green as anticlimactic. Any single memory is less significant than its pursuit. Once more, Beckett anticipates Chaikin and Shepard. In Proust, he shows that a “good memory” usually means a dead mind:
The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything. His memory is uniform, a creature of routine, at once a condition and function of his impeccable habit, an instrument of reference instead of an instrument of discovery . . . [His] memory is a clothes-line and the images of his past dirty linen redeemed . . . 42
This personal complacency about the past has a cultural equivalent: the obsession with the documents, monuments, hallowed territories, and other records of lived experience which Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead sets against a second, more suggestive repository of memory. This latter form is in fact formless, or at least variable – the “patterned movements made and remembered by bodies,” as Roach calls them, and the parallel histories recovered in oral culture, responsive to the needs, expectations, and biases of the present even as they summon the past.43 (One could see them as the figures to whom Beckett’s “dirty linen” belongs.) As constituted by bodies and voices, this memory is vulnerable to their afflictions and thus in need of the kind of ongoing renewal of attention Beckett envisions. Roach gives actors the job. They are “caretakers of memory,” he writes elsewhere.44 In their own resurrection of characters and of the culture surrounding their plays, actors define history as a force forever in circulation and subject to revision or redirection – something never past. For the actor, the past can only be recovered by rehearsal, improvisation, the trial and error of memorization, and the dying-in-life of performance. Roach cites Pierre Nora’s terms: “Moments of history” are never “torn away from the movement of history.”45
But what if the actor himself is “torn away from the movement of history”? Imprisoned in the present tense, the aphasic Chaikin challenges one’s faith in oral and kinesthetic memory (and complicates the theory derived from it) by showing that orality itself can be just a “moment” – lost along with the events, places, and people one used to talk about. (Moreover, in his work with the Open Theatre, Chaikin took aim at conventions of speech as emptied out of meaning as are certain sites and artifacts.) In his attempt to recover language, Chaikin by necessity goes deeper into the past than do most actors. He’s not merely embodying or referring us to memory. Each time he seeks an individual word, he also, implicitly, revisits the distant moment when, by the act of naming, a speaker first ushered into consciousness a strange new phenomenon. Enunciating a word as if it had just been coined, Chaikin recreates the larger industry involved in forming a world. Forgetting that word soon afterwards and seeking it anew, he offers himself as a model of sustained historical awareness and engagement.
At the intersection of these revisions to language, habit, narrative, and memory, Chaikin is nonetheless still Chaikin. On stage in The War in Heaven, he twists his head up and back, furrowing his brow before he delivers a line, then recovers his poise in the motionless aftermath, inhabiting a thicker stillness from which to enjoy saying unusual and presumably hard-won words: “throngs,” “turtle,” “extraordinary.” Often he looks at us with an expression that moves between guilelessness and disappointment, reflecting but never retaining our interpretations of his exposed state. Perhaps he is too exposed. As Jonathan Kalb and others have asked (if only as devil’s advocates), what distinguishes this art from Barnum’s, beckoning audiences to gawk at what the impresario called “anomalies?”46 (The question will be familiar to those troubled by their enjoyment of Robert Wilson’s early work with the deaf and mute Raymond Andrews and the brain-damaged Christopher Knowles.)
In response, one might point to the many modes of resistance in The War in Heaven. As he turns the pages of his script, Chaikin seems to control the pace of his exposure. When he waits onstage after the performance, in the still-roiling wake of his speech, he faces down and outlasts our own watching. At those moments when Chaikin selects an individual spectator to hear him say “turn me loose,” he could be referring to the confining stage as much as to his condition. But the notion of mere resistance is too flat to suggest all the ways Chaikin and Shepard keep us from being complacent about what we see. In fact, in performance Chaikin seems to confide in us so totally that he moves us past voyeurism – and beyond mere sympathy and even identification – until we are enveloped by his wordless world. It becomes the standard alongside which the memory of our own begins to seem the “anomaly.”47
Moreover, despite the candor of his testimony, Chaikin manages to keep his distance, withdrawing even as he makes himself available for scrutiny. This kind of presence is proprietary: he is there, but not there for us. In this respect, Chaikin (and Shepard) recall a much earlier, little-discussed project, Robert Frank’s quasi-documentary Me and My Brother, for which Chaikin acted the “brother,” Julius Orlovsky (the real Julius also appeared in the film), and Shepard collaborated with Frank on the screenplay. Although it was made only a few years after Chaikin and Shepard met, the film can stand as a kind of coda to the history of their collaboration – uncannily anticipating ideas about representation that only now are being addressed with the same depth in their theatre. Frank’s own one-line synopsis guides viewers returning to the film from the recent collaborations: “A film about a silent man and an actor who became silent.”48 Like Tongues, it is mindful of the explosiveness of even the simplest utterance. Like When the World Was Green, it features a protagonist defending himself against scrutiny, refusing to disclose his secrets. Like The War in Heaven, its closest kin, it points the significance of the protagonist’s struggle by chronicling its own struggle toward completion.
Orlovsky is schizophrenic, and an ambivalent participant in the documentary he shares with his brother Peter and Peter’s companion, Allen Ginsberg. Mid-way through the shooting, Julius withdraws: never reliably communicative, he responds even less to Frank’s direction, and becomes a taciturn, mildly reproachful presence on the film’s margins. Frank hires Chaikin to speak for Julius – Chaikin plays him in scenes Julius himself won’t do – but the actor acquires his character’s attitude and most prominent symptom. In one scene, Chaikin, as himself, says, “My speech is all used up. I have nothing else to say. Nothing else to read from. I don’t know what to play. Who should I be? Who shall I play?”49
Stronger than Chaikin’s desire to act (and more pertinent to the challenges Chaikin faces now), though, is Julius’s desire not to be acted. Me and My Brother is a compendium of dodges and feints, its protagonist (or is he its antagonist?) a master of elusiveness, for whom silence and other forms of absence are essential to his claim of presence on his own terms. The film’s opening sequence sets the tone – the camera lingers over a sign reading “Stop. Do Not Enter” – and for the next eighty minutes Julius deflects the approach of Frank’s camera, won’t follow Shepard and Frank’s script, undermines Chaikin’s impersonation, and ignores the attentions of other “characters” and finally ourselves. He doesn’t resist so much as avoid encounters in which resistance would be required. At a poetry reading, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky try to get Julius to take the microphone; instead, he sits on the floor behind them, impassive, onstage but not on display. In another scene, a psychiatrist questions Julius, but Julius dispenses only that information about the self that doesn’t give the self away – his and his brother’s names, their shared address. He foils a second interview soon afterward, shaking his head almost imperceptibly as the questioner tries to compare their eyes. He changes his appearance over the years of filming – a beard, a different haircut, and so forth – and at one point disappears entirely.
Finally, in the film’s beautiful last scene, Julius speaks freely. Frank’s camera is distanced, kept behind a window through which it frames Julius sitting on a porch. Yet even now Julius won’t meet its gaze. As he keeps his head in profile, Frank, off-camera, asks, “What do you think about acting?”
“My name is Julius Orlovsky,” he says, and then he does look at us, leaning in with mild defiance and curiosity. Here, Julius sets his real presence against the memory of Chaikin’s actorliness, just as, in The War in Heaven, Chaikin himself sets his own history against his scripted parable. The film ends with small talk, crucial for being scaled to Julius’s specifications. He begins:
– It’s chilly, chilly.– It’s cold [says Frank].– Well, whether it’s cold, I don’t know.
After finally emerging from his silence, Julius has the last word.
1 Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard, The War in Heaven: Angel’s Monologue, in Shepard, A Lie of the Mind (New York: New American Library, 1987), 137. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
2 Hugh Kenner acknowledged the tyranny of radio in his discussion of Beckett’s own radio plays: “A purely aural landscape capitaliz[es] eerily on the fact that whatever falls silent disappears” – a fact, Kenner notes, that Mrs. Rooney objects to in All That Fall: “Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present, and alive, to all that is going on” (Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968], 167–68).
The original radio broadcast of The War in Heaven was taped and distributed by Raven Recording (New York, NY) under the title Joseph Chaikin Performs Struck Dumb and The War in Heaven (1984). The 1991 stage production of the play, directed by Nancy Gabor and produced by the American Place Theatre, was videotaped and is housed in the Theatre on Film and Tape Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. My discussion of Chaikin’s performance refers to a 1999 presentation I saw at the Yale School of Drama and to this videotape. Both productions use a slightly revised version of the text, as yet unpublished.
3 Sigmund Freud, On Aphasia: A Critical Study (New York: International Universities Press, 1953), 23.
4 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Nohow On (London: John Calder, 1989), 116, 118.
5 Gerry McCarthy, “‘Codes from a Mixed-up Machine’: the Disintegrating Actor in Beckett, Shepard, and, Surprisingly, Shakespeare,” in Enoch Brater (ed.), The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 181–87. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 120–24. Also see Enoch Brater, The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
6 Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), 131. Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1977), 369.
7 Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin, Tongues, in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 302, 311. Page references in parenthesis within the text are to this edition.
8 Joseph Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991), 152, 97.
9 Jean-Claude van Itallie and the Open Theatre, The Serpent (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1969), 21, 33.
10 Shepard, La Turista, in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, 293; The Mad Dog Blues, in Shepard, The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 290; Melodrama Play, in Shepard, Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 134; Curse of the Starving Class, in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, 168. Also see Shepard’s explicit portraits of aphasia – the untitled prose description of his mother-in-law’s stroke in Motel Chronicles (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982), 126–42, and the character of Beth in A Lie of the Mind (1985).
11 Carol Rosen, “Silent Tongues: Sam Shepard’s Explorations of Emotional Territory,” Village Voice, 4 August 1992, 35–36.
12 Karen Malpede (ed.), Three Works by the Open Theatre (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1974), 142.
13 Barry Daniels (ed.), Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts, 1972–1984 (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994).
14 Shepard, The Mad Dog Blues, in The Unseen Hand and Other Plays, 258–59.
15 See, among others, Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 32–33; Michael Vanden Heuvel, Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theatre and the Dramatic Text (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 193–229; Bonnie Marranca, Theatrewritings (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984), 24; Richard Gilman, “Introduction” to Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, xvii. Shepard disputes such influence in Carol Rosen, “Emotional Territory: an Interview with Sam Shepard,” Modern Drama, 36.1 (1993): 7–8.
16 Cowboys #21, in Shepard, The Unseen Hand and Other Plays, 142.
17 Cowboy Mouth, in Shepard, Fool for Love and Other Plays, 159. Page references in parenthesis in the text are to this edition. In his Introduction to this collection, Ross Wetzsteon links these lines to Waiting for Godot.
18 Action, in Shepard, Fool for Love and Other Plays, 183. Page references in parenthesis in the text are to this edition.
19 David Savran, “Sam Shepard’s Conceptual Prison: Action and The Unseen Hand,” Theatre Journal, 36 (March 1984): 57–73, 65. For a more general discussion of Shepard and memory – what its author calls “the anxiety of erasure” – see Jeanette R. Malkin, Memory-Theatre and Postmodern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 115–54.
20 A. R. Luria, The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 106, 108. Page references in parenthesis within the text are to this edition.
21 Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 67–96.
22 John Hughlings-Jackson, quoted in Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 19.
23 Howard Gardner, The Shattered Mind: The Person After Brain Damage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 78.
24 These and other cases are mentioned in Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language,” 86; Gardner, Shattered Mind, 65; Luria, Man with a Shattered World, 132. Chaikin’s situation is described in Jonathan Kalb, “Chaikin Through the Flames,” in Free Admissions: Collected Theatre Writings (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 181, and in a short film, Joseph Chaikin: Working Director, by Aviva Slesin (1996).
25 Shepard, “Note” to Tongues, in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, 300. See also his letter to Chaikin in Daniels, Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard, 36.
26 Shepard, Savage/Love, in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, 336.
27 Sam Shepard, “Language, Visualization, and the Inner Library” (1977), reprinted in Bonnie Marranca (ed.), American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), 217.
28 Beckett, Three Novels, 353.
29 McCarthy, “‘Codes of a Mixed-up Machine.’”
30 Quoted in Naomi Greene, Antonin Artaud: Poet Without Words (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 151. Beckett anticipates this image in Murphy, when he describes a character feeling “spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded” (quoted in Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words [Oxford University Press, 1993], 60). The original definition of aphasia further suggests how the condition may actually preserve a word’s life: the first recorded use of the term (by Sextus Empiricus) referred to “a condition of mind according to which we neither affirm nor deny anything” (quoted in Gardner, Shattered Mind, 89.) Kalb’s own reference to Artaud appears in “Chaikin Through the Flames.”
31 Quoted in Greene, Antonin Artaud, 149.
32 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 113, 119.
33 Joseph Chaikin, “The Search for a Universal Grammar” (interview with Andrzej Bonarski), in Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (eds.), Conversations on Art and Performance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 443–44.
34 Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor, 129, 85, 132. A “raid on the inarticulate” is from Eliot’s “East Coker,” much of which is pertinent to Chaikin’s current condition: “And so each venture / Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating . . .” Thanks to April Bernard for drawing this to my attention. In a different context, and with different motives, Richard Foreman also envisions using the voice to enter a condition when he writes of being “in speaking” in his play Permanent Brain Damage (1996).
35 Malpede, Three Works by the Open Theatre, 98. Eileen Blumenthal discusses “somatic” acting in Joseph Chaikin: Exploring at the Boundaries of Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 54ff. and elsewhere. In a videotape of workshops for Terminal, appended to the public television version of The Serpent, Shami Chaikin demonstrates this approach particularly well: she begins an improvisation with the line “I thought he was dead,” and says it over and over until it loses its word-sense and becomes a wail.
36 Chaikin made his comparison to Kaspar Hauser in an address at City University of New York Graduate Center, where he was awarded the 1987 Edwin Booth Award. The speech is on videotape; thank you to Joseph Chaikin for loaning me his copy. Shepard acknowledged his own interest in the Kaspar theme as early as 1978; see his letter to Chaikin in Daniels, Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard, 46.
37 Freud, On Aphasia, 88. Also see Luria, Man with a Shattered World, 19–20.
38 Alex Gildzen and Dimitris Karageorgiou, Joseph Chaikin: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 19.
39 Oliver Sacks, “Foreword” (appears only in the 1987 edition) to Luria, Man with a Shattered World, xvii. Luria’s book The Mind of a Mnemonist (New York: Basic Books, 1968) describes a patient with the opposite and no less agonizing condition: he could never forget anything.
40 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1985).
41 Blumenthal, Joseph Chaikin, 81–83. Also see Daniels, Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard, 111, 122, and the workshop drafts of The War in Heaven included in that volume.
42 Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 17.
43 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 26.
44 Joseph Roach, “The Emergence of the American Actor,” in Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol. I: Beginnings to 1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 338.
45 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 26.
46 Kalb, “Chaikin Through the Flames,”183. Kalb defends Chaikin against such criticism – here, in reference to his performance in Susan Yankowitz’s own play inspired by Chaikin’s aphasia, Night Sky – by writing that he “conveys something of [the] dignity . . . of the actor in extremis.”
47 A similar change happens during performances of Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance. The production is virtually silent – to replicate the aural world of the deaf actor at its center, Raymond Andrews – and before long spectators are seeing more than they ever did when sounds competed for their attention.
48 Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), unpaginated.
49 Quoted in Frank, Lines of My Hand.